Eye-Tracking Google SERPs - 5 Tales of&nbspPizza

A while back, we got an offer we couldn’t refuse. The good folks at Mirametrix asked if we were interested in custom eye-tracking data (which traditionally costs a small fortune) for any Google searches. Um, does Matt Cutts like cats?

Since I once worked down the hall from an eye-tracking lab, I was the obvious choice to lead this shopping spree at the nerd candy store. So, we picked 5 different Google SERPs, representing the diversity Google has created in the past couple of years, including the newly expanded site-links. This is the story of those SERPs. They’re all about pizza, because I’m from Chicago and was apparently hungry when I made the list.

The Equipment & Methodology

First, a little bit of background. Mirametrix produces affordable, portable eye-tracking systems for researchers. Our data was collected using an S2 Eye Tracker (shown to the right), which looks a little bit like an Xbox Kinect. Each SERP was shown to 8 subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 for 30 seconds. Subjects were told the search term of interest and then were allowed to view the full-screen SERP freely. All SERPs were de-personalized and localized to Chicago, IL.

Heat maps were created by aggregating the subject data. Subjects saw the full-screen SERP, but I’ve cropped each image below the point that activity trails off. I should note that this is actual eye-tracking data, which should not be confused with “click maps” or heat maps created from mouse movements. These patterns come from people’s direct visual interaction with the SERPs.

(1) Local #1 - "best pizza in Chicago”

I’ll start with a query for “best pizza in Chicago”, because the results are probably closest to what you would expect. I picked this particular SERP because it had strongly integrated Local/Places results, along with maps on the right. The eye-tracking data looked like this:

You can see a modified “F-shaped” pattern here, with most activity centering on the top results and some eye movement toward the map. As you might expect, the top listings attracted the most attention.

(2) Local #2 - "pizza"

Next up is a local search for “pizza”. These results were more varied, with a couple of organic results followed by an integrated 7-pack that more clearly separated Local/Places results. This data got a bit more interesting:

The impact of the Local 7-pack appears to be very powerful, drawing attention from the top 3 organic listings. Even map fixations appear to be toned down from the first SERP. Whether this is because people are familiar with Google’s local results format or are attracted to the distinct formatting, it’s clear that they were biased toward this part of the page.

(3) Video Thumbnails - "how to make a pizza"

This one was a special request from the Big Boss – Rand was interested in the impact of video thumbnails in organic SERPs. I found that the query “how to make a pizza” brought up video thumbnails for the #2 and #3 spots. Here’s what the data had to say:

Although individual results are a bit hard to separate, it does appear that subjects’ eye movements focused on the first video thumbnail, possibly even at the expense of the #1 organic result. Especially with something as visual as a pizza (who doesn’t love pizza?) the attraction of an image could really tip the click-through scales.

(4) Product Images - "pizza cutters"

The next search was for “pizza cutters” – this brought up brand and store searches at the top, along with images for shopping results after the 3rd organic listing. The eye-tracking data looked like this:

There’s definitely some pull toward the product images, although the top organic results still do fairly well. The “Related Searches” seem to get relatively little attention, even though they appear where the first organic result would usually be.

(5) Expanded Sitelinks - "Pizza Hut"

Finally, we decided to test-drive the new site-links. A search for “Pizza Hut” brought up 6 expanded site-links. Not surprisingly, this search also triggered some local results. Here’s the visual:

Although the Pizza Hut listing gets some fixations, there seems to be a strong pull toward the local listings. Even with a full pack of expanded site-links, the main Pizza Hut site got much less attention than I would have expected. When you want pizza, you want pizza, not a corporate history.

Some General Implications

I think the first and most obvious implication is that, as Google moves away from 10 plain listings for more and more searches, it is definitely having an impact on search users. You need to be familiar with your competitive space and take advantage of SERP enhancements, like video thumbnails. Ranking #1 might not be pulling the weight it used to if your competitors down the page have more visually interesting results.

These results also suggest that the in-page Local/Places results are having a strong impact, even if they fall in the middle of the page. In these limited cases, they seemed to pull attention away from the top organic spots. If your query has a local flavor, you need to be aware of how your Google Places page is competing.

Of course, these are exploratory results, and more data would be needed to back up any given finding, but I hope the general observations are interesting. I’d like to thank Ben Yoskovitz for setting up this opportunity, and Anton and Amineh at Mirametrix for managing and running the eye-tracking studies.

Pete, what an amazing visual that confirms empirically what so many of us in Local Search have surmised for years about how important Google Places rankings are. Interestingly in Google's response to Yelp's Senate complaint, their counsel stated that fewer than 10% of Local clicks go to Place Pages...obviously a great deal of those go right to SMB websites that are blended into Place Search.

What's perhaps most interesting to me is that CUMULATIVELY, Blended results may be taking more total clicks away from "pure" organic sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc., than a 3-Pack or 7-Pack would. Seems like people focused rather intensely on SEVERAL of those Blended results, rather than the either/or of just the 7-pack vs organic...

Great stuff, man.

EDIT: Equally interesting is how intense the focus was on the map over to the right. I can't believe that thing STILL gets so many eyeballs. It seems like the map (which just leads to a maps.google.com view of the same Blended listings) is not a "good click" for users. Surprised G doesn't allow people to just filter "List View" vs "Map View."

Yeah, the blended results are very interesting, and I'd like to see more data on that one. I suspect Google is only going to experiment more, and for local SEOs, the idea that the Top 3 command all the clicks is a dangerous illusion.

I agree this is very interesting. It seems as though people are looking at the pinpoints on the map, then matching them with the listing to the left. This give them a conceptual idea of location and allows them to read more about the business at the same time.

My thoughts exactly. That's how I do it. Look at the map to see how far the businesses are from me, then get quick info, like name and ratings, from the Places listing in the organics, correlating the data between the physical location and the Places info.

I would like to see the results example like in slide #1, except with ads at the top of the page. Particularly ads with the light blue tabs. I have a feeling those ads are outperforming all others in local results.

Having spent a lot of time with eye tracking studies in my former life as a newspaper editor, the pull of the map and other visual elements on the page in some of these is not so much of a surprise. Images have long been used in traditional page layout as a device to "pull" readers through a page.

The thing I find surprising is that this visual power actually doesnt seem to hold up very well against the "local" results in the last test. Of course there is some visual impact within the local results themselves, but I would generally expect to see a large image take more attention.

So herein lies a lesson for site designers that have come out of the print publishing industry ... while much of what you know about page layout may hold true, the power of the information seems to outdo the simple visual device in some cases.

Perhaps this also warrants some further investigation to determine what exactly is driving the result.

I was surprised there weren't more ads, also! Just as surprised as I am that the ads that were there received enough attention to show up covered in some red!

I would suspsect these things are related - that when fewer ads are shown, those that are receive more attention -- except the shots show that ads on the pages with only a few ads have about as much attention as the ads on pages that have a full set of ads. Very unexpected, and useful data!

I was thinking the same thing about Pizza. I couldn't beleive that their weren't more results. Guess Google is drilling down the most relevant pizza shops in the area. Looks like local SEO has become just a little bit more important!

I am pretty interested in the confirmation that all the results in the local 7-pack get almost equal attention. And they totally crush all the other results on the page, including the AdWords (Express) ones!

At the same time, it is interesting to note (as David said) that the map draws so much attention in the blended search results. I believe a reason for that, especially for this particular query, is that people would be naturally searching for a place close to their current location. I believe if the search query was related to service-based business the results were going to be a bit different.

The equal attention across the 7-pack may be a bit of an anomaly of aggregating eye-tracking data. I doubt it's quite that even, but it's hard to cleanly separate individual results. You can see the gravitational pull, but you can't always see the planet. The spread is definitely interesting, though.

Dr. Pete, I believe the equal attention across the 7-pack is not an anomaly. However, I think the results might differ if you have a SERP in which 5-6 of the listings have no stars bar (less than 5 Google reviews) and the other 1-2 have it. The ones with the stars bar would attract much more attention I think. Check out a case study here: http://bit.ly/owPLNI

Great post, Pete. I would be very interested to see how these types of results differ from industry to industry. For example, for #2, even if someone does type in "pizza," they are indeed going to be drawn to the local listings because it's something people also buy on a local scale, from a local source. It'd be interesting to see how this differs for things searched for and typically bought non-locally (e.g. "car insurance" in the UK) to see if the psychology differs in where people look (or know to look, as the case may be)... Fascinating stuff.

I suspect there's a strong query-intent influence. People searching for "Pizza Hut" typically do want to find a local restaurant or oder. For other queries, and if the intent was non-local, the expanded sitelinks probably do have a positive impact.

I would love to see a similar report for a universal SERP for a universal query -- perhaps for terms like "solar panel information"; "sommelier certification"; "b2b sales techniques" or "books and magazines art".

One interesting tidbit in the Sitelinks results showing for the Pizza Hut query was the bump that was generated by the first sitelink under Pizza Hut.... Were people attracted it to it becuase it was the first sitelink or because it says "Deals"?

I suspect there's a strong query-intent influence on that one. If you're searching for "Pizza Hut" you want to order a pizza 95% of the time. It would definitely be interesting to see how sitelinks acted without local or in other scenarios.

I think the interesting takeaway, for you local SEO guys, is that the idea that every SERP is "average" and only the Top 3 matter is a dangerous illusion in 2011. Strong local intent could make the #1 result almost irrelevant. Never mind when I type "Pizza Hut" on my iPhone in Google Maps and never even SEE an organic SERP. If you're a local business and you're still living in the land of 10 plain SERPs, you might as well look for work as a unicorn-hunter.

Great post, and nice to see someone else talking about eye tracking on SERPs.

I've only seen one other commenter mention it (@veezy), but the first thing that jumped out for me was the methodology of looking at the SERP for 30 seconds. Nobody goes to a SERP just to look at it, and we know from all kinds of research that most SERP exposures last than 30 seconds.

This leads me to caution people looking at the heatmaps to interpret them in that context - searchers were not explicity given a task of finding "pizza", but rather were just told that they were going to look at the results for that search (correct me if I'm wrong!).

The maps on the right rail are a great example. We've seen in our research that the maps are typically ignored. Searchers may glance at them briefly, but for the most part they find something in the text listings and click through. By just having them look at the SERP for 30 seconds, the kind of visual exploration the searchers do is likely very different from actual task-directed searching.

Definitely interested in hearing your thoughts on the methodology, and if you plan to dig into this kind of thing further.

It's a hazard of an laboratory scenario, and certainly a common one for these eye-tracking studies. The problem with SERPs is that actual behavior gets pretty weird - people click, bounce, click, bounce, etc., and what you'd end up with from an eye-tracking standpoint is a total mess.

So, we isolate this one aspect and try to combine that with other available data, like click-through studies. It's not perfect, but it's a piece of the puzzle.

Search intent certainly makes a difference. If we were really isolating one SERP, we'd probably try different instructions and different search intents. In this case, I really wanted to take a broad look at a variety of SERPs and ask a more fundamental question - "Do all these varieties of SERPs matter?" If people are really trained to just focus on the Top 3, then nothing Google did would change that behavior.

I think it's at least clear that all of this SERP variety probably does have an impact. We also know that Google does eye-tracking studies, so it stands to reason that they're seeing a difference, too (or they probably wouldn't keep making these changes). How any given element impacts any given SERP is going to be very situational and really understanding something like expanded site-links would take a series of studies.

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Pete. I agree with you on it being a hazard of testing in a lab. When we do our eye tracking studies, for the most part we only looked at first click and whatever happens before that (I'd love to explore the 2nd+ exposures more!).

Worth noting that these tests are on "static" SERPs. People's behaviour is quite different when using Google Instant. I did some eye tracking of Google SERPS with Google Instant a little while ago.

http://beantin.se/post/1984313223/google-instant-eye-tracking

What I saw then is that when people looked at the search results, they looked at the top result. Hardly on any occasion did any result outside the top 4 positions receive any attention (including blended snippets).

Interesting. Obviously, we both did small-scale studies and they're more exploratory, but definitely food for thought. I'm seeing Google pull back on Instant for a lot of queries, and I wonder if they found the impact too dramatic in some cases. I'd definitely like to do more testing on queries with local intent, because I think that can be an entirely different animal.

Fantastic analysis, Dr. Pete. This is, so called "old topic" but with new angle view. It reminds me on some similar article, i google it and found it very quickly. Maybe it would be good for readers to 'supplement knowledge' about this, and read [url=http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/eye-tracking-studies-more-than-meets.html] Eye tracking studies, more than meets the eye[/url] from official google blog, written two years ago.

Awesome study. Definitely not too suprising and especially if the subjects have used Google places results before. I have seen some interesting data when organic listings moved above a 7 pack for a client...traffic didnt change over 10%. I like to compare it to Pavlov's study.... People catch a glimpse of the map and their eyes look for the local results.

I would love to see a study with Google Adwords Express in the results and see how the blue pins pull looks compared to normal ads.

very enlighting experiment this one. Even taking into account that these are "exploratory results", they can give us some footprints to follow and investigate further.

Apart the ones you already put in evidence, I would like these mine:

Sitelinks: it seems that people use somehow a "panoramic" view to sitelinks, focusing on the main snippet and the first sitelink only, while with side view "sees" the others. That can be interesting in order to how organize your sitelinks in GWT, putting as first your second most important page [and if the re-organization of sitelinks is available, as it seems not so always from the 6 pack sitelink introduction]

When Adwords appears (and appears just in two cases, weird), it catch the eyes, but not that much, even in the case it is the first result in the page.

Verticals like video/images: they catch the attention because of their own visual nature. Therefore, apart confirming the rightness of optimizing your site also for these verticals, the visual impact they have in attracting the attention is making me consider how important is to choose wisely what frame to show of your video snippet and how good must be photo, even though it is a pizza cutter. About photos, maybe because of the same nature of watching, it seems that the best is to be the first/second one and the fourth/fifth one; the photo in the middle suffer of "side vision".

Local listing. As David said in his comment, this experiment confirms how important they are. About the map... again, IMO, the visual attention is attracted first by images, and the map is substantially an image. But if you pay attention, you see that the main focus in where the letter marked bullets are, which is quite logical; in fact you look for the best pizza in Chicago and you want to know where they are not just what they are: the combo local listing and map serves this need of the user.

Surprised as some of the results are not as I expected… like importance of local listings when they are even below the page (like your 5th experiments says)

The one thing I like about Dr. Pete is the fact that he don’t talk much but put the data in front and data speaks for itself… another superb job by Peter J. Meyers.

Probably by now everyone in the SEO worlds know the fact that local listing that appear in the search results are important and to have your business listed with the relevant keywords, but what makes this post special is the data and fact that how actually the local data is important where there are other features like site links are also on the search results.

It’s easy to summaries that now with good website it is also important that you should be locally visible and you should have different multimedia data (i.e. Videos, Photos e.t.c) to grab larger number of organic eye balls.

Besides the heat map screen shots, do you have any specific result data? As we did with the golden triangle years back, I'm hoping to break down the area into grid/quadrants and quantify the amount of eye-share each section gets. If you have that, please let me know and I'd be happy to get the anaysis back to you.

Cool research, not sure exactly how this captures the information. How would this capture what the person is looking at from their searches would be my question. As the results go, there have been tons of research and studies done about the differences in the SERP's by placement. The difference between organic and local listings has changed throught the years. Local placement since Google has implemented changes in the last year or so has opened the door to lots of local companies which is what it was designed to do in the first place. Since the inclusion directly in the SERP's seo companies have been offering localized services more and more. While local listings are extremely important in your marketing strategy, organic listings are the most important. The most recent study I read about organic listing placement showed a 30% increase in traffic from being in the third spot to being in the first spot on organic placement. This is a significant increase in site traffice just within the top three postions. This imaging definately shows the variations from listing to listing and seems to be what I have been reading elsewhere as well. Cool research tool.

Hmm. Very interesting. Not entirely suprising but confirmation through testing is always comforting.

As a comment on the Pizza Hut SERP, I often avoid the corporate site because I'm searching from my mobile and I want to get to a click-able phone number as fast as possible. In every case so far, Google Maps/Places is faster than going to a corporate "locations" page.

I'm a huge proponent of optimizing pages for mobile. Especially for local retail businesses. If I knew I could count on Pizza Hut to deliver a quick mobile page, with geo-detection for locations nearest to me, I'd go straight there and skip Google. It's just not the case for most websites.

It's almost a circular process - rank just below the places results and get more clicks, then as Google sees your link getting more clicks your rank moves up and you then get less clicks and move down, round and round you go.

This may explain some of the movement of the top 5 that I have seen and wonder, what is Google seeing on a daily basis that would make the top 5 shift so actively.

Pretty amazing study. Although it's not perfectly representative of a real user search experience, it does well to affirm and triangulate some of the stuff we already "knew." It seems to me that those pin-drops really servie their purpose on the Places listings.

Great post, I love the picutres and what they can teach us. It's not just about optimizing your site, now you should be optimizing places, photos, videos, and your sitelink extentions. Also shows people in the local area that they can compete with "pizza hut" if they are optimizing their places account. If you look when they searched "pizza hut" the first result in places was not pizzahut.com

Isn't it obvious that an optimized VIDEO (that auto generates a thumbnail) is well worth the effort. It took < 25 links and < 30 minutes to get our video ranked on page 1 goog oranic for water heater repair aurora and while the view count is small compared to other plumber longtails, the asset it positve ROI.

The pull of visual elements is, honestly, stronger than I would have assumed. Given that we know Adwords is the cash cow for Google, it is interesting to think about how they may try and leverage data like this in future ad units. The Adwords site links were a big intrusion on the organic real estate, but what happens if/when paid ads become more visual? Would a paid ad with a video thumbnail garner the same visual fixation? I don't know, but it's not going to shock me if Google gives us the opportunity to find out soon!

Thank you for posting this, Pete. One of my clients asked if I had seen 'the eye movement study on google searches'. I typed that string into the google search bar and here it is! The interesting thing is that the F pattern that is evident in the 1st and 2nd images also relates to online content. Very interesting. Thanks again.

Fascinating. Some years ago I began assigning rank-weighted values to SERP positions (based on the fact that higher slots are more valuable than lower ones, so they they aren't all worth the same). I took various studies*, blended the consensus value of different SERP positions (I was correlating SERPs claimed by a brand with brand valuations) and recently published the calculations in a public domain app.

Pete, GREAT images!I was surprised to see that the paid Adords ads only appeared in a couple searches, and that they did catch more eye traffic. Another element that stands out to me is the importantence of local listings!

Wow that is cool! Not only does this data cofirm most of our local search "hunches," it also reaffirms the importance of the meta description as an ad opportunity to sell your search result. You can really see the potential for a #5-6 result to steal taffic from #1-4.

If anyone didn't already believe that optimizing local listings with photos and videos was a must, they have to now!

They tend to work more with traditional researchers, so their methods aren't really SEO-focused. Google has certainly collected a mountain of that data, but they've only shared a tiny piece of it. It's certainly the next step in the public research.

What caught my eye is the amount of engagement based on the ranking. The higher up the page the more the meta description and title tag are reviewed - its almost as if the user checks out at rank eight and is resigning themselves to not finding what they want and refines their search query.

Great post it just goes to show how blind we really are to the search results and how we need to be doing everything we can in the titles and snippets to really stand out from the crowd (as well as appearing the with/in other page one content areas such as videos, places and shopping).

It seems that titles are even more important for click throughs than I realised. People don't seem to be reading meta descriptions at all according to this data, which may make them virtually useless for the average site. I personally do read the descriptions before clicking - am I the only one?!

I wouldn't say they don't matter, and the lab environment is still somewhat artificial, but there's solid evidence that people skim and process a SERP very quickly. In many cases, they aren't just focusing on the title, but the first 2-3 words of the title.

It's a nice start, however, I'm always sceptical of data produced from such a small sample, and without prior knowledge of how representative the sample is of search engine users.

We're they shown the queries in any particular order, or was it at random each time. As if they were shown in order 1-5 then it could be that in example 1 & 2 local results provided them with the most insightful information so by the time they came to 5 they immediately jumped to local results with the preconception that it would provide the most insightful information.

It's not a 1-to-1 relationship and this is just exploratory data, but people do process search results incredibly fast (Google's research has shown this more than once), so I think it's safe to say that where you look does drive where you click to a significant degree. That's also why people back up into SERPs so much. They don't review all the options and pick the best one - they pick the first decent one, click on it, and then if it's not what they want, go back and pick the 2nd decent one.

As valuable as it is to know which result they are clicking, you could argue that it is just as valuable to know which results they are looking at and deciding NOT to click. (Is it the messaging, something about the image?)

As far as I’ve observed it’s the impact of the design of serps, which actually catch the attraction of user, like Google got a simple white background and search results are in simple three colors blue (the Titles), green (urls) and black (description). And any other color that displayed in the serps is unusually and gets better user attention as it’s out of the regular color combination of Google’s design.

Information of this type is extremely critical of huge value, leads to enormous expenditures, etc. A sample size of 8 is far too small. More critically, who were the 8 people? Were they 8 staffers? 8 geeky nerds (using your wordage from the paragraph at the top)? Very curious.

Pictures and representations like this are extraordinarily powerful and convincing. I practice lots of Local SEO. I have strong faith in the effectiveness of the 7 pacs. Through a variety of businesses I've seen first hand the power of the 7 pac/ the blended 7 pac (almost a year old now) and most vividly 1 boxes having been both on the WINNING AND LOSING side of them for serps for various businesses.

Visuals within serps are powerful indeed. The heat maps focused on the videos and the product inserts into google serps were very powerful also. Finally I found it interesting and revealing that the heat maps on the right hand side of the page, showing maps and PPC ads also attracted significant traffic. Looks to me like a PPC ad on the right hand side at the TOP beats the bejeebers out of an organic SERP at probably 7,8,9, or 10 in standard SERPS.

Sample size with eye-tracking is actually a bit weird. It's not an experiment in the typical sense, and if you have too many observers, you end up washing out effects. So, it's a bit of a balancing act. I want to be clear that these results are exploratory - they're a limited set of viewers on a limited set of SERPs. I think they're interesting and can drive further explanation, but they're not conclusive.

Yeah, I know - it sounds a bit like "If we got too much data, we might not like what we saw" :) I'm not an eye-tracking guru by a long shot, but the trick is that there's not really a solid statistical measure of converging fixation data across visitors. For the smaller studies, they tend to look at the people individually and make the call - is the pattern converging, or is everyone doing their own thing? What's enough data to declare convergence? We don't have precise math to tell us. If we kept adding people, we'd both make some of the data clearer and add more noise (which is good and bad).

In these cases, there seemed to be convergence, but that's a somewhat subjective call. For any given scenario, replication is important. Admittedly, too, this was sort of a budget approach, so I'm not going to claim that 8 is a magical, ideal number. I view these as interesting first steps.

by the above searches ..heat maps.... I got the understanding that the Local searches and the video searches make a good impact on the Searcher(user), even If i were given a chance to search for those keywords I would have done chosen the local searches and the vids.. it is the human psychology.. that we all like the nearer places for anything to get and the visual representation such as Vids... and apart of that Even Google panda.. now favors the video sites which is quite supportive to the video searches!

Great work. It's been a while since Enquiro released the Golden Triangle eye tracking studies. Nice to see some updated research.

One takeaway that I'm seeing based on the eye-tracking snapshots is that it's almost more advantageous to have those calls-to-action (e.g. Google Places, Videos, Sitelinks, etc.) than having a top spot in the SERP. But we wouldn't know for sure without click-through data. If you have click-through reports to accompany the eye-tracking data that should uncover some further insights.

Very interesting, obviously need a much larger study to get firm conclusions, however have seen for some of my local clients, that receive visits from national keywords, when site appears in Google Places results, even when appear in middle of the search results.

Personally feel best strategy now is to try and encourage clients to have an all round presence, SEO, Adwords, Places, Video, Blog, Social Networks, etc, as due to the dynamic nature of the search results, being as high up the organic listings as possible / high max adword CPC, not what it once was.

Awesome study. I was blown away by the tracking data for the local 7 pack vs the top organic listing. This actually frustrates me a bit as I find maps to be a shot in the dark sometimes vs getting placement at the top. I'm also very curious along with others to see how this study would have turned out with some competition from adwords express. I have found that the little blue pin has tremendous pull. I'm not surprised by the video thumbnails getting so much CTR love. What could possibly beat a delicious looking pizza thumbnail?!

Did the subjects know that they were participating in an eye-tracking study? And were they only allowed to view the screen as opposed to interact with it (click through, etc)? Did they type in the search themselves or was the screen presented already rendered?

I wonder if the results would have been different if they were tasked with something more than just looking at the screen?

Overall it's still interesting and useful, though probably not that surprising for designers or people who understand the human eye's attraction to contrast.

I noticed that on the "how to make a pizza" query the wording in the title of the top result doesn't much echo the search query, whereas the titles of the results with the images do use a very similar wording to the query. Even if the images weren't present, I think my attention would still be drawn more to the 2nd and 3rd results because their titles give a strong reflection of the search query which is then reinforced in their descriptions, while the top result only reflects the query in its description. I'm not trying to suggest that the images aren't important in attracting attention, just that they may not be the only factor in play.

I like that the right sidebar sponsered ads don't get clicked on as much as the natural results and I am a little surprised that the "shopping" link with the images isn't the hot spot on the SERP. Either way it's 10 am and I now know what I'm getting for lunch. Thanks

What a fantastic bit of research Pete. While the sample size for this study is small, it offers initial evidence of how incredibly impactful Local listings can be, along with image and video thumbnails.

You have given us meaningful data which we can use to take immediate action. Always a pleasure reading your articles. Thanks for sharing!